By Alan Feuer and Michael Wilson
There are several ways to describe how the past 12 months have gone for the New York City Fire Department, and none of them are good.
The numbers speak for themselves – 343 killed; 91 vehicles destroyed; 213 members of the senior command lost to retirement; $104 million paid out in death benefits; as many as 500 firefighters at risk of leaving the force because of lung damage suffered at ground zero; 4,971 applicants for the department, a fraction of the 25,000 or so who typically apply in a given year; 4,400 years of collective experience vaporized in the span of some 30 minutes.
The images speak, as well – mountains of flowers placed outside firehouse doors across the city, a sea of white-gloved men and women standing at attention as another coffin was carried from another church, blackened bunker gear, a tattered flag.
Beyond the statistics and the emblems, however, lies the swerving emotional course of this past year, which cannot be described by the department’s own members – at least not clearly.
Somehow, the firefighters of New York confronted death, guilt, deification, disillusionment, fear, hordes of tourists and the numbness of having to tell their stories over and over again, and yet still mostly managed to go out each day to do their jobs. They are tired and overwhelmed. They are, by and large, sick of their own pain.
It has shown. They scuffled with the police after the city reduced their numbers on search-and-recovery teams at ground zero. The families of their lost comrades made millions through charitable donations but worried, with reason, about being tarred as rich beyond need. Some members have sued the city, contending negligence in endangering their health at the ground zero cleanup. Firefighters submitted to both an internal critique and a highly public one, and winced when it was found that their chiefs were at sea as disaster struck.
Though bond traders and janitors died the day the towers came down, it was firefighters who emerged from the rubble as the face of last year’s tragedy. The department did not quite ask to be a national symbol of grief and perseverance, but its members have grieved and persevered, in public, nonetheless.
“You can’t go through life being a World Trade Center survivor, right?” one lieutenant said. “You’ve got to do other stuff.”
A year has passed for the survivors, and in recent weeks city officials and the department’s own leaders have taken steps toward assessing where the 11,100-member force now stands and how best to rebuild and improve it. The steps, large and small, have included everything from an overhaul of the department’s top management to a new policy ordering ambulances to bear placards making clear they are not terrorists in clever disguise.
The first priority has been to replace the 343 dead men, nearly 50 times the number – 7 – who die in the line of duty in any average year. The department lost 20 percent of its elite forces and 42 members of its five rescue units, which are called upon to save fellow firefighters in distress.
In the aftermath of the attacks, the department scrapped entry requirements to allow recruits who have not finished college to begin training. It pushed through classes of roughly double the normal size. The first, a class of 313, was sworn in last November. A fourth class graduated in July.
Because the department lost so many of its officers, including its first deputy commissioner and its chief of department, it has pushed through 671 promotions since last September. There is a new chief of department, a new chief of operations, 3 new assistant chiefs, 14 deputy assistant chiefs, 29 new deputy chiefs, 71 new battalion chiefs, 179 new captains and 331 new lieutenants.
The department’s top management was reorganized and expanded as well, under a plan set forth by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg last month. At its core, the plan called for increasing the number of staff chiefs, the department’s highest-ranking uniformed members, to 18 from 10. Five of these men were given direct authority over each of New York’s five boroughs, instead of each of them being responsible for the entire city.
The staff chiefs also traded the timeworn practice of working 24 hours straight and then taking three days off for a regular five-day workweek. Mayor Bloomberg has said the department’s managers should match their work schedules to the rest of the city’s business week.
Retirements Drain Force
In a single morning, the collapsing towers killed more men than are usually in an entire class at the Fire Academy, and yet, some officials say, the impending flood tide of retirements will be just as damaging to the force.
Scores of the department’s supervisors, including some of its most senior commanders, have retired since last September and hundreds more have notified their union that they expect to leave in the next year. The same mass exodus is occurring among frontline firefighters: they are retiring at more than double the usual rate.
“The retirement thing is going to be, in retrospect, the worst thing that has happened to the New York Fire Department post-9/11, bar none,” said Stephen J. Cassidy, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association.
According to the department, 747 firefighters of all ranks filed retirement papers over the last 11 months, compared with 475 who had retired in the same period a year ago. Of late, about 40 firefighters have been retiring every week. A year ago, 40 firefighters might have retired in a typical month.
While some have elected to leave because of emotional or physical exhaustion, many more have chosen to go because it makes good financial sense: their retirement pay is based on their last year’s salary, and in the months after the disaster, they have increased their salaries with huge amounts of overtime.
The loss of a vast pool of experience in the trade center disaster was bad enough, officials say. Add to that the loss of veteran firefighters through retirements, and the process of breaking in new recruits grows twice as hard.
“Experience is key in fighting fires,” said Capt. Al Hagan of Ladder 43 in Harlem. “In probie school, they teach you the choreography, the cha-cha, the tango, and now the music starts. Can you perform with the music on? Well, at the beginning, you can’t.
“You get 10 new guys in a fire, when the fight-or-flee reflex hits, flee will take over. You need, `Don’t worry, kid, you’re doing good, stick with me.’ I have six probies in my house right now. Brand new. Still tissue paper around them.”
Lt. Ewald Pollich, 59, attended a recent retirement seminar put on by the department. He is leaving because of his enhanced pension after all the overtime. He is also broken up about it. He was one of dozens at the seminar.
“It’s a very personal and tough process,” he said. “You love the job and you’re finalizing it. You’re coming down to this. It’s over.”
But it will not be over, of course, for those left on the job.
“The guys in the department are going to take a tough hit in terms of safety,” said Lt. Larry Flaim, who is training newly promoted supervisors. “There’s 300 probies out of probie school they’re pumping out. It’s not that you have inexperienced firefighters. You have probies with no experience. I’m totally torn. The guys of my era constantly talk about this.”
Moving to Repair Flaws
Last month, McKinsey & Company, an independent consultant, produced a report on the Fire Department’s response to the trade center attack. While the effort was brave and aggressive, the report concluded, it was also plagued by communications problems, lapses in discipline and a lack of coordination with the police.
It said, for example, that when Assistant Chief Joseph Callan issued an evacuation order over the radio at 9:30 a.m., roughly an hour before the north tower fell, “there was no acknowledgment by firefighters.”
To improve communications, the department has ordered new radios that it believes are at least modestly better at penetrating high-rise buildings than the old ones and are capable of linking with police channels. It has asked the federal government for $60 million to install repeaters, which boost radio signals, on many tall structures and is talking with the Police Department about sharing the network of 300 police radio stations across the city, Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said.
The Fire and Police Departments have a long history of competition, and friction at emergency scenes is legendary. Coordination between the two forces was so poor last year that a police helicopter pilot, hovering over the north tower, radioed at 10:07 a.m., “I don’t think this has too much longer to go.” Most firefighters never heard the warning.
Earlier this year, Commissioner Scoppetta announced the creation of an interdepartmental committee of high-ranking police and fire officials. A fire chief is now stationed permanently at 1 Police Plaza, and a police captain now works as a liaison at the Fire Department’s headquarters. Fire chiefs will now be allowed to fly with police pilots over burning buildings. Mr. Scoppetta said he himself meets regularly with Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner.
The Fire Department has always been proud of its roguish, outlaw spirit, an attitude that stretches back to its earliest days, when firehouses were not city-run outfits, but private gangs that often battled one another on the way to battling fires.
When the planes hit last year, scores of firefighters rushed from their second jobs to the trade center. Many bypassed staging areas and their own commanding officers. There was a mad rush to the scene. Sixty off-duty firefighters died.
The impulse was admirable: it was a selfless struggle to save the endangered. The benefit of hindsight shows it was also fatally reckless.
Lt. Peter Sapienza was in Italy when the towers fell and said, had he been in New York, his instincts would have probably gotten him killed.
“If I wasn’t in Italy, I would have run down there at 9 in the morning and run up in the building with no equipment and no radio,” he said. “And I’d be dead.”
The department has started to rethink how it plans to deal with terrorist attacks. Instead of sending three of its five rescue units, for example, it may send only two. It will also keep its sole hazardous material unit far from the scene, to protect it in case its expertise is needed later. Most important, it will not send so many chiefs and firefighters to the scene.
“You don’t fight a war by having every four-star general go to the front lines,” Mr. Scoppetta said.
Hardest Step: Seeking Help
The country seems to be on a war footing now, and in wartime there are casualties. There are mental strains and breakdowns. There are heroes, too.
The department has identified the remains of 204 of the 343 dead men, and the ghosts of the missing hover in firehouses like an old, familiar song playing in the other room. The ghosts are present every time a new guy sits in a dead man’s favorite chair. They are present in the riding boards – the chalkboards listing the names of the men on tour – that have hung, unerased, on some firehouse walls ever since that day.
The job seems different now, firefighters say. It is more about fighting terrorism than fighting fires. They sell T-shirts and pose for pictures. They have guilt and nightmares and see body parts when they close their eyes.
“It’s not the same,” said Firefighter Bobby Annunziato, a 19-year veteran. “It’s no fun coming to the firehouse. The guys are great, but you don’t know what’s out there. It’s crazy out there, this terrorism stuff.”
At first, the public attention helped the healing. The hugs and candles, the articles and casseroles, covered up deep wounds like a scab. The attention also pushed away the anguish. They could talk to the tourists, or the television cameras, instead of talking about themselves.
With the summer, however, came the first halting steps toward normalcy. It was time, many felt, to be left alone.
“People come by and come by and come by, and you feel like saying, `Enough is enough,’ ” said Byron Bodine, a firefighter. “But that’s their way.”
Nearly 3,000 firefighters have sought in-house counseling in the last 12 months, and yet their public image makes them skeptical of looking for help. It is a “Not me, I’m fine” phenomenon. Firefighters have been trained to ask, “How are you?”
Firefighter Annunziato finally sought help 358 days after the attacks. He returned from his session – “cuckoo time,” in the harsh parlance of the firehouse – with orders to take time off.
“I’d been bucking it,” he said. “I’d been trying to say I don’t need it, I don’t need it.”
Malachy Corrigan, director of the department’s counseling service unit, said the number of those seeking assistance may actually increase after the anniversary.
“I think there’s a profound sadness, and the public nature of the grief has impacted on the members of the department and elongated it,” he said. He said the stamp of “hero” only stalls self-help. “Can heroes feel bad?” he asked. “Can they grieve? Can they be angry? For the person that’s put on a pedestal, how do you get down? You don’t want to fall off,” he went on. “You want to get down gradually.”
Like many engine drivers, or chauffeurs, Firefighter Jack Butler of Engine 6 in Lower Manhattan was the only member of his unit to survive because he was on the rig outside the towers. He tried one recent day to sum up where the department stood. He sounded unsure, no longer trusting that even the public’s admiration and affection would last.
“At some point in time, you have to step back and move on,” Firefighter Butler, 56, said. “I don’t know, after this anniversary, if people are going to keep coming. You know what I mean? For the general public, I wonder if they are going to keep coming by?”
Courtesy of The New York Times
